I recently added a wiki on my MapMe.At site and found it quite tricky to get working and difficult to find just the right information I needed so I thought I’d write it up.

MapMe.At is still on Rails 2 which seemed to mean I couldn’t install Gollum as part of the site.

I created a separate Rails 3 project that runs alongside MapMe.At and simply hosts Gollum, using instructions from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13053704/how-to-properly-mount-githubs-gollum-wiki-inside-a-rails-app

I wanted it to use the user information in MapMe.At’s session hash so switched MapMe.At to use activerecord based sessions and used information on here to make the rails 2 session load in rails 3: http://www.kadrmasconcepts.com/blog/2012/07/19/sharing-rails-sessions-with-php-coldfusion-and-more/

I’m not actually using the rails2 session as the main session, I just load the information in. I have the following in config/initializers/session_store.rb

module ActionController
  module Flash
    class FlashHash < Hash
      def method_missing(m, *a, &b;)
      end
    end
  end
end

MapmeAtWiki::Application.config.session_store :cookie_store, key: '_mapme_at_wiki_session'

Then in routes.rb:

class App < Precious::App

  before { authenticate }

  helpers do
    def authenticate
      oldsess = ActiveRecord::SessionStore::Session.find_by_session_id(request.cookies["_myapp_session"])
      if oldsess and oldsess.data and oldsess.data[:user_id]
        u = User.find(oldsess.data[:user_id])
        email = "#{u.username}@gitusers.mckerrell.net"
        session["gollum.author"] = { :name => u.full_name, :email => email }
      else
        response["Location"] = "http://mapme.at/me/login?postlogin=/wiki/"
        throw(:halt, [302, "Found"])
      end
    end
  end

end

MapmeAtWiki::Application.routes.draw do
  # The priority is based upon order of creation:
  # first created -> highest priority.

  App.set(:gollum_path, Rails.root.join('db/wiki.git').to_s)
  App.set(:default_markup, :markdown) # set your favorite markup language
  App.set(:wiki_options, {:universal_toc => false})
  mount App, at: 'wiki'

end

I wanted a wiki on the site to allow my users to help out with documenting the site. Adding their own thoughts and experiences and perhaps fixing typos I might make. I’m not sure that’s really started happening yet but at least I have a nice interface for writing the documentation myself!